But you know... If you claim a piece of legislation as a major accomplishment in a campaign add, you should have written the bill of been a major supporter of it, or at the very, very least be present to vote on it.
Do I even have to say who did that?
Apparently the most Obama did to it was try to insert an amendment to the bill, which was not passed. Is that how low the bar is now?
Yuval Levin has more.
Even under the most generous reading imaginable could any of that count as passing legislation that extended health care for wounded troops? The Chicago Tribune noted the problem on its blog last week but defended Obama by pointing out that John McCain didn’t vote for the bill either. That would be an interesting piece of information if John McCain had cited this bill as among his chief legislative accomplishments.
The Obama team’s desire to pad the resume is understandable — it’s awfully slim after all. But this kind of dishonesty will catch up with them…or at least it should.
In related news, it may be that Obama's "gaffs" are catching up to him.
"Obama loses his Teflon Sheen"
By laughing not with, but at, Obama the mainstream media again demonstrated the type of emotional distance one might almost mistake for journalistic independence. (Conservative pundits have been mocking Obama’s elite iconography for some time.)
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If McCain can do that, and more importantly, if the media re-adjusts their outlook to cover Obama as they would any ordinary politician, the result may be significant and the race more competitive than only the most optimistic Republicans thought possible.
Empahsis added. That would be a nice dream wouldn't it? To cover Obama as a man, and look at his actions and his past record.
That the question is even being raises is a victory I suppose.
Related articles about this shift in view of Obama.
The Mendacity of Hype by Geoffrey Norman
For realists — or cynics, if you prefer — there was finally some good news from the presidential campaign. No more worries about “a new politics” and “change” which, if they had been for real, would have required one to take the campaign seriously and pay attention to this season’s political star, Barack Obama. Turns out, it was a sham.
Normally, realists have a fairly easy time of it when it comes to presidential politics. Without knowing who the candidates are or what they are saying, one can confidently assert, “They are all the same,” and “The way you can tell that they’re lying is that their lips are moving.” You don’t have to do any deep research or hard digging to back up these assertions in any given political season.
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But we all hope for something else, we all have a sequestered place in our hearts longing for “a new kind of politics.” And when we hear whispers of it, we want to buy in. Barack Obama had a lot of us going for a while. He was “post-racial.” He was all about “hope” and “audacity.” He was for “change.” And this time, he promised, we really could achieve it. “Yes we can.”
Well, it appears that it is time to say, “Be still my heart,” and move on to other things. Obama told us his campaign wasn’t going to be about the money — after all, that was politics as usual. He was going to “aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.” Later, he expanded on that to say, “I will sit down with John McCain and make sure that we have a system that works for everybody.”
Well, McCain is still waiting for that sit-down. Turns out, Obama is all about the money. Now that he can raise more on his own than the government could have offered him — and probably more than McCain can raise — Obama has changed his mind (assuming it was ever made up), and is hoping the voters will not hold it against him.
Politics, man — you do what you gotta do.
And Peter Wehner piles on "St. Barack Was a Mirage"
The problem for Obama is that his core appeal has been largely aesthetic; he positioned himself as St. Barack, flying high and high-mindedly above the “old” politics of distractions, divisions, and cynicism. He wouldn’t play the “Washington game.” Obama has been sold to us as post-everything (post-partisan, post-ideological, post-racial, and post-label). If that appeal is stripped away, then Obama will be seen as a deeply and reflexively liberal one-term senator — and as something of a fraud. That combination may be enough to defeat him in a year that should overwhelmingly favor Democrats.
I doubt we’ve reached the point at which Obama’s tactical moves have metastasized into a character problem — but I suspect we’re getting close. Columnists like David Brooks and Michael Gerson, both of whom have had favorable things to say about Obama in the past (as have I), wrote columns on Friday that are evidence of how much things have changed when it comes to Obama. Even among our political class, Obama seems to stand out as highly ambitious, fairly ruthless, and utterly self-interested political figure. When John McCain says he would rather lose an election than lose a war, it is a believable claim. One cannot imagine Obama saying — well, sincerely saying — that same thing about anything. His political viability — a term once used by a young Bill Clinton — seems to matter above all to Barack Obama, dwarfing every other consideration.
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